Turkey blocks Instagram for censoring pro-Palestine voices

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Turkish authorities blocked access to the social media platform Instagram on Friday, a day after authorities condemned the social media platform for censoring pro-Palestine voices.

Turkish media reported that social media users across Turkey were having difficulty accessing Instagram on Friday morning, Rudaw English has confirmed from several users. Other platforms owned by Instagram’s parent company Meta like WhatsApp are still accessible.

Crowd-sourced technology watchdog DownDetector reported users increasingly were having problems accessing Instagram since 3 am local time on Friday.

The Turkish Information and Communications Technologies Authority (BTK), the body responsible for monitoring the Internet, announced that “instagram.com has been blocked by a decision on the date of 02/08/2024," without elaborating.

Censoring Instagram comes a day after Turkish authorities slammed the platform for preventing people from posting pro-Palestine content and sharing condolence messages for Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, who was killed in the Iranian capital of Tehran early Wednesday.

“I also strongly condemn the social media platform Instagram which is actively preventing people from posting messages of condolences for the passing of Hamas leader Haniyeh without citing any policy violations,” said Turkey’s Head of Communications Fahrettin Altun on X on Thursday. “This is censorship, pure and simple.”

“We will defend freedom of speech against these platforms that have showed many times that they are primarily in the service of [a] global exploitative system of injustice,” he added.

Imposing sanctions and restricting the services of tech companies is not new in Turkey. In May 2023, X (then Twitter) restricted access to “some content” in Turkey to ensure that the social media platform remained accessible in the days before the country’s presidential election.

In June, the Turkish competition board fined Google 482 million lira ($14.85 million) for obstructing the operations of its rivals “by favoring its own local search (Local Unit) and accommodation price comparison (GOOGLE Hotel Ads-GHA) services in the general search results page in terms of positioning and display and preventing competing local search websites from entering the Local Unit, thereby distorting competition in the markets.”

From 2017 to 2020, Turkey’s information and technologies authority BTK also blocked access to Wikipedia after the website’s administrators refused to remove two pages stating that Ankara had channeled support to extremists in Syria. BTK said the law empowers it to ban access to any website deemed obscene or a threat to national security.